Fiction
Sing You Home, by Jodi Picoult. After years of infertility, it looks as if Zoe and Max Baxter are finally going to have the baby they’ve longed for. But when their hopes are dashed by a miscarriage and their marriage collapses, Max escapes, first into alcoholism then into religion, while Zoe concentrates on her career as a music therapist. Library Journal
Nonfiction
Against All Odds: My Life of Hardship, Fast Breaks, and Second Chances, by Scott Brown. Scott Brown’s greatest win did not occur on a cold January election night in 2010 when he came from behind to capture the U.S. Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy for nearly 50 years. It began when he survived a savage beating at hands of a stepfather when he was barely 6 years old, while trying to protect his mother. From the publisher
Paperback
An Improvised Life: A Memoir, by Alan Arkin. With very few exceptions, name-dropping and anecdotal bons mots are conspicuously absent in this story of a 45-year career in film and theater. What you will find is a profoundly honest and revelatory reckoning of an artistic and personal awakening grounded in the methodologies of improvisation that Arkin learned in his early work with the seminal Second City. Library Journal
Ordinary Thunderstorms, by William Boyd. Boyd creates the wide spectrum of London — from its lawless slums to its posh boardrooms — with arresting cinematic detail. And the many characters who populate these pages, from drug-dealing prostitutes to drug-making chief executives, are surprising and sympathetic. The Washington Post
The Secret Lives of Dresses, by Erin McKean. Blogger McKean’s retro fashion-forward, coming-of-age debut follows Dora Winston as she sashays toward a degree in “vagueness studies” while engaged in a fruitless flirtation with her coffee-shop boss. Publishers Weekly
The Subject Steve, by Sam Lipsyte. Lipsyte’s first novel follows his stack of short stories, “Venus Drive,” which showed a steel grip on language but often added up to paragraphs of brain-fog. Kirkus Reviews
